This is the state to which Protestantism, merely as such, always tends. The tendency was seen clearly from the first. Luther himself was bitterly grieved, perplexed, and baffled by it. The enemies of Reform seized upon it as the weak point, the joint in the harness, where their keenest darts might strike. Bossuet, whose domineering temper attacked as haughtily the gentle spiritualism of Fénelon and Madame Guyon as the vigorous dogmatics of Calvin, considered that he had damaged fatally the cause of the enemy, by exposing some two hundred "Variations of Protestants," into which they had diverged, in parting from the Roman See. Yet still the spirit remains unsubdued, and the work of disintegration goes on. The variations may be by this time as many thousand; yet the essential nature of Protestantism remains unchanged. And if this one tendency were followed freely out, the result could only be- what some have anticipated and even longed for that all bands of religious fellowship should be dissolved, and every man stand absolutely alone before his God.

But, if it were only to make an organized opposition possible, some check must be found to this centrifugal force; some common ground must be chosen, where men may waive their differences, and act together for the cause. Accordingly, the history of Protestantism is not so simple a thing as the history of opinions branching out more and more widely asunder, and tapering from dogmatism towards scepticism at one pole, and sentimental mysticism at the other. It is the history of a conflict between two opposite tendencies, and perpetual attempts at compromise. On the one hand liberty of thought, on the other the need of union; the dissolving and the organizing tendency, - these are what the history of Protestantism exhibits from the first. It is not crude and chaotic, as might seem at first, but is eminently dramatic, — all the more so, because of the free and open field in which the two contend. Leaving out the era of the Reformation, when the mere need of self-defence necessitated some sort of armed union, and as it were a military discipline, - Modern Protestantism shows itself as a force acting perpetually in two different directions, and perpetually conflicting with itself: on the one hand, professing liberty of conscience and thought, the essential princi

ple from which its very life must spring; and on the other, striving to suppress its own vagaries, to set boundaries here and there, and to rally the dispersive forces to act in one organism together. Its strength and its weakness are from the same source, the liberty from which it springs. To foster that strength and overcome that weakness is the perpetual problem which Protestantism exhausts itself to solve.

It would be too long a task to trace the series of attempts, so familiar in our religious history and even in the range of our own experience, by which Protestantism has sought a substitute for the vast domineering, subtle, despotic authority, that excites at once its rebellion, hate, and fear. The process at first seemed simple. From the corrupt Church, fall back upon the Church in its simplicity; from councils and priests, fall back upon the Apostles; for the false Vicar of God, take the infallible Word of God. "The Bible, the Bible only, is the religion of Protestants," became the watchword of the Reformation. Luther's first great task was to give it to his people in their mother tongue; and the noble series of English versions was crowned, after the lapse of near a century, by that which, with all its faults of detail, is so sacredly and dearly associated with our own best thoughts and hopes. But soon it appeared that, aside from all the critical difficulties and doubts, the Bible might be read in almost as many ways as there were minds to read it. If Luther and Calvin differed as to some of the plainest words of the Gospel, what must be the effect of offering, as the creed of millions, the whole array of history, prophecy, proverb, appeal, and fervid inward experience, that goes to make up the Bible? Some confession, some creed, some formula of faith, seemed not a violation of Protestant principles, but a necessity of the position; and, the creed once defined and assumed for authority, then follows the whole long, sad story of bigotry, exclusion, persecution, religious hate, sectarian jealousy and feud, until, sick at heart, many despair of the cause of religious liberty itself, and yield to the still dread spell of Rome, or else abandon the hope of Christian fellowship altogether. The history of creeds, i. e. of Protestant theology, as a substitute for the grand and awful spiritual despotism of the Catholic Church, from the bloody persecution

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of the Arminians in Holland by the Calvinists, themselves scarce emancipated from the frightful tyranny of Spain, down to the small village rivalries between Orthodox and Dissenter, or the puny controversies on the limits of Christian fellowship, and the right of a man to adopt the Christian name, — shows through what melancholy straits the human mind must pass, in the historic evolution of a great idea. Dogmatic theology, from the incoherent mysticism of the Trinity down to the frightful assertions of hopeless depravity and everlasting perdition, is the shady side and the weak side of Protestantism,its vain endeavor to rear a fabric of ghostly authority, which should have the charm to captivate, or the majesty to overawe, the emancipated intelligence of the human race.

Here are only weakness and failure. The strength of Protestantism and its glory have been the practical, positive work it has set on foot; not its religious organizations, as such, but the spirit it has emancipated and set to vigorous action by means of them. The great battle of religious liberty, so heroically fought; the laborious culture and evolution of relig ious thought, in schools of criticism, philosophy, and morals; the noble enterprises of conscience, in the founding of Christian republics, and in laying out the field of modern philanthropy; the grand religious enterprise of universal missions, which, even if a failure as to its main end (as some say), is yet a glorious attempt; still more, the courageous grappling with dark social problems, pauperism, slavery, crime; these are the fruits that have grown, for the modern world, from the root of individual liberty of mind and soul, the life-root of the Reformation. Personal energy, personal conviction, conscience acting in direct obedience to God, resolute will that calls no man master upon earth, these inspired the heroic protest of Luther; these have been the vital principles, since, of the world's best religious life. Say that it ran in the blood of the German race, foreordained from their day of savage liberty to the development of organized democracy; or say that it is the ripe fruit of Christian thought and life, to be appropriated wherever there is vitality enough, this it is plain to see. The history of Protestant nations is the history of the enterprise, discovery, commerce, arts, science, invention, learning, and

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philanthropy of modern times. This glorious inheritance we receive along with our birthright of religious liberty. The nobler energies of mankind, latent and suppressed under the dominion that weighed upon the soul, waited its emancipation, as great rivers wait the breath of spring, to give force and volume to their flow. There is scarce one great movement of the last three hundred years, of permanent and marked success, and affecting deeply the welfare of mankind at large, dating from the Roman Church, or any people under its control, to set off against the great political reforms of England, the colonizing of free states in America and Australia, the organizing of republican institutions, the revolution in commerce wrought by steam, and that conquest of nature inaugurated by modern science. All these are part of our modern inheritance of liberty of thought. They, of course, are not to be ascribed to Protestantism, consciously working out as such; they are not its product as an organized spiritual force; but they are the trophies of that emancipated energy, that free intelligence, that bold individual conscience, which it was the mission of Protestantism to herald as an agency in the world's affairs. As widely as the spell of Rome remains, so widely this energy continues latent, inert, and impossible.

The weak side of Protestantism is seen in this, - that it does not understand the energies it has invoked: it fears them, shrinks from them, and dares not even attempt to control them. Liberty of thought it has sought vainly, by every expedient, to pacify, overawe, and hush. The portentous birth of European Democracy, which sprang up at its side, it began to fear and hate as soon as it outran the cautious limits the Reformers had proposed. When the nobles scorned Luther's counsels of justice, and the peasants rejected his words of peace, he, even he, a man of the people, was sharp and implacable to side with authority against rebellion. "A pious Christian," said he, "should die a hundred deaths rather than give way a hair's breadth to the peasants' demands." Challenging the authority of the Church, Protestantism has leaned on the arm of the state. It is but a feeble barrier it has interposed to the ambition and pride of worldly powers. The English Church began by owning the king's supremacy

as its head; and he Henry the Eighth, who persecuted right hand and left at his caprice. It canonized Charles the First, who traded away the faith reposed in him, and died a martyr to the cause of absolutism. The Protestant Church of Germany has both hindered and betrayed the cause of popular liberty; so that in 1849 some democratic leaders said, in bitter rage, "Our mistake was in not cutting off every man who believes in God; we will remedy that mistake next time." In America we have seen the encroachments of a despotism as sordid, as stealthy, as unscrupulous as any in Naples or Vienna, and as deeply and openly steeped in crime; a despotism erected on the basest of all possible foundations, property in man; which, under forms of popular government, has insulted every instinct of liberty, and, under forms of law, violated every principle of justice; yet how slightly resisted by the Protestant Church, spite of its birthright of liberty, how largely helped by the alliance of the so-called Catholic, with its instinct of servility!

Now it is not the Protestant Church which is to blame for this: at least, it is its position, not its disposition, that is to blame. It is not the fault so much as it is the weakness of Protestantism, that it fails to present any strong barrier to the encroaching powers of the world. As an organization, it has no basis except in deference to its dogma, or else in personal reverence for the right and true. Its motive energy is not in the collective body, but in the individual soul. Church forms only preserve and maintain; the free conscience must animate and create. The very task it accomplished in crippling the hierarchy of Rome was to rid the world of a spiritual power strong enough to meet and match the political forces of society on their own ground. It was against the very genius of Protestantism to provide a substitute.

This inherent weakness of Protestantism is especially seen in its failure to take in the religious and moral wants of society, — its failure, perhaps we may say, even to try to comprehend or meet them. We mean (of course) directly, in its religious organizations. It is the glory of the Catholic Church, that, with all its falsity and faults, it did meet the social problem of Christianity as a whole, so far as it could VOL. LXXIV. -5TH S. VOL. XII. NO. I.

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